I Just Can’t Stop Having Sex

To be fair, I haven’t really tried, nor did I have any real motivation to curb our satisfying but irregular sex life. In some instances, I can hardly even be blamed; when you watch the guy you have a huge crush on playing with the gorgeous child he helped make, you sort of lose control of your libido. It’s not that you meant to drag him back into the bedroom after replaying the same episode of Sofia the First to distract your kid. It’s more that you legitimately had no other choice but to climb him like a tree when you watched him patiently sit as she put four necklaces on his neck and crowned him with a broken plastic tiara.

But I’m reaping what I’ve sown. I’m a total slut for my husband, and now I’m pregnant again.

That’s right, fam. I am a cautionary tale. If you can’t keep it in your pants, you will get pregnant, and…

I guess have another great kid and round out your tiny family.

To be fair, this is good-ish news. I always knew I wanted to have more kids eventually, but by eventually I meant in a long, long time, like, maybe when I was forty and I pulled my eggs out of the freezer and blew the dust off of them. Or maybe when I was sixty and Lucy was forty and modern science had evolved to the point where I could just sort of hatch one, like out of an egg, and say hooray! You finally get that sibling I told you you’d get ‘eventually!’

Instead, though, we are having another surprise baby, which at this point I’m pretty sure just makes us irresponsible. I mean, one unplanned pregnancy at 20 years old is forgivable. It’s like ‘alright, you crazy kids, we’re not mad at you but get it together.’ But now we’re both 24 and married and already parents so another baby is just sort of expected. By everyone but me, at least.

I was floored when I found out. I had just moved to Maine and was three weeks into my new job. Sure, my period was late, but I could hardly blame my body. I was more stressed out than I’d ever been, since we moved thousands of miles away from our home with half of a plan and very little preparation. When I got here, we had no house, Orie had no job, and there were no real prospects for either. I handled this stress by swallowing my screams and watching a lot of Netflix, happy to immerse myself in the fictional lives of literally anyone else.

But then it worked out! Orie got a great job, we found a spider-infested murder farmhouse, and life picked up a normal, doable pace. Yeah, money was a little tight and Lucy was asking for to see her aunts and uncles in Alabama fairly regularly, but we had a new plan. We were on course. Things were steadying out.

And then I peed on a stick, and I saw those two little lines, and I said ‘of fucking course.’

I had just started my career. I had just made peace with having Lucy in full-time daycare. I had just left behind my entire network of support. I had just given away so many baby things because ha ha, we sure as hell wouldn’t need ‘em! I had just picked up the snow globe of my family’s life and single-handedly shaken it until you couldn’t quite make out what was beyond the flurry of white, and oh yeah, I moved us to somewhere that was soon to be covered in snow.

I genuinely couldn’t decide whether this was worse timing than when I was twenty years old, halfway through college, broken up with my boyfriend, and found out I was pregnant. It seemed like it, but I’ve always had a flair for the melodramatic.

Now, I’m still not sure, but I do now that I can do this. I die a little inside when I consider the implications of halting my career so early on to enter into Baby Life Round Two, but Orie is a great dad and Lucy is a wonderful tiny person. I might not have a billion aunts and uncles and in-laws to help like I did the first time but I’ve done it once before and surely it’s like riding a bike?

I guess I won’t know until the baby interloper arrives. Until then, I will just panic over what’s going to happen to my body after baby number two. If it ruins my boobs, it will be forever solidified as Least Favorite Child.